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Wednesday, May 04, 2011
Game Score-ing Liriano’s No-hitter
Last year, I proposed four different Game Score metrics. Each one focused on a particular subset of a pitcher’s game results. A score of 40 is meant to be replacement level, 50 is meant to be average, and 100 is meant to be “the best”.
The first one focused just on runs allowed:
GameScore = 7 * IP - 10 * R + 40
So for Liriano’s 9-inning shutout (really, anyone’s shutout), the game score is 103.
The second one focused only on K and BB:
GameScore = 3 * (SO-BB) + 40
If you had a 20K, 0BB performance, that’s 100. But, that’s not what Liriano had last night. Oh no. He had 6 BB and 2 K (to go along with only 66 strikes and 57 balls). So, he ends up with a game score of 28, which is pretty crappy.
The third one focused on FIP:
GameScore = -13 * HR -3 * BB + 2 * SO + 3 * IP + 33
Liriano gets his -18 for walks, +4 for K, +27 for IP, and 33 for a total of 46.
The fourth one was LWTS-based:
GameScore = -8 * HR -5 * H -3 * BB + 9 * IP -2
So, Liriano gets a 61.
So, based on your perspective to the game, he either had a 103, 61, 46, 28. That’s quite untelling… and telling. Basically, that kind of spread is what you’d call “an ugly win”. There’s no reason that we’d take the simple average of those. You could of course weight the runs method far more than the K/BB method. The simple average of those 4 is 60.
Along the lines of the simple average, but just trying to get some nice round numbers, the above 4 methods becomes this:
GameScore
= 40
+ 4.5 * IP (<-- coefficient changes based on run environment)
+ 1 * SO
- 1 * H
- 2 * BB
- 2 * R
- 5 * HR
So for Liriano, he starts with 40, and you add in 41 for his complete game, add 2 for his strikeouts, and subtract 12 for his walks. That gives you 71. (Bill James’ version says 83.)
Really, in order to figure out the “proper” weight, you, as a person, need to find these “ugly” type of games, where one method says one high score, and another method says another high score. And then you come up with your personalized weighting scheme. You don’t need me to tell you how to appreciate the game you just watched.
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